Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

The companies that Google Ventures invest in face big questions every day: Where's the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your ideas look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution to a problem? Business owners and investors want their companies and the people who lead them to be equipped to answer these questions - and quickly.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the burgeoning growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation's most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd

Warning: Do not listen to this book if you hate money! To build a successful business, you need to stop doing random acts of marketing and start following a reliable plan for rapid business growth. Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast.

The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

Steve Case was on the leading edge of the Internet revolution when he cofounded AOL in 1991. He was an entrepreneur in a business that hadn't even been invented, yet he saw how significantly his efforts could change not only America but the world. In The Third Wave, Case uses his insights garnered from nearly four decades of working as an innovator, investor, and businessperson to chart a path for future visionaries.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Exponential Organizations: New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It)

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

Virtual Freedom: How to Work with Virtual Staff to Buy More Time, Become More Productive, and Build Your Dream Business

Entrepreneurs often suffer from "superhero syndrome" - the misconception that to be successful, they must do everything themselves. They are not only the boss but also the salesperson, HR manager, copywriter, operations manager, online marketing guru, and so much more. It's no wonder so many people give up the dream of starting a business - it's just too much for one person to handle. But outsourcing expert and "Virtual CEO" Chris Ducker knows how you can get the help you need with resources you can afford.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

Step by Step Crowdfunding: Everything You Need to Raise Money from the Crowd

In this step-by-step guide, you will find the actual process you need from idea conception through pre-launch and fulfillment to make your fundraising or crowdfunding campaign a success. I skip all the history of crowdfunding and why it is a great tool for your business to go straight to the point; how to put your campaign on the path to beating its funding goal.

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

Equity Crowdfunding: Transforming Customers into Loyal Owners

Equity crowdfunding is going to change our view of capitalism. This book is about more than raising money for a company. It is a book about how business owners can turn their customers into loyal owners. Smart leaders will further transform their investing customers into evangelists for the business. With its ability to leverage social networks to gain market share, crowdfunding offers established local businesses the largest marketing opportunity of all time.

Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything

Whether we need to make better financial choices, find the love of our life, or transform our career, crowdsourcing is the key to making quicker, wiser, more objective decisions. But few of us even come close to tapping the full potential of our online personal networks. Zoref's clients are using his techniques to innovate and problem-solve in record time. Now he reveals how crowdsourcing has the ability to supercharge our thinking and upgrade every aspect of our lives.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Maverick thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb had an illustrious career on Wall Street before turning his focus to his black swan theory. Not all swans are white, and not all events, no matter what the experts think, are predictable. Taleb shows that black swans, like 9/11, cannot be foreseen and have an immeasurable impact on the world.

13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time

Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense. Science's best-kept secret is that there are experimental results and reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet 13 modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow's breakthroughs.

Publisher's Summary

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise - it's talented, creative, and stunningly productive.

Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you've got the job.

If you have read Groundswell, Wikinomics, and the Wisdom of Crowds, this book repeats some of the concepts that were well described in those books. Crowdsourcing is a good book and provides plenty of background and detailed explanations around some of the well known "crowdsourced" companies such as threadless.com, topcoder.com, istockphoto.com, and a few others.

The basic concepts are as follows:
- there are 1 billion internet users with anywhere between 2 to 6 hours to spend per day;
- there is a large portion of the population that is over-qualified for their day job and as such are looking for ways to use their skills;
- combine these facts with a drastic decrease of the cost of technology and increased power of technology and the possibilities are endless;
- most importantly 'amateurs' can now compete on the same ground as professionals in many fields;
- as an organization, you cannot control what the crowd will do - the crowd decides what it will work on. The community will work on project of their interest;
- you should start a crowdsourcing project with the intend to make money BUT you may end up making money as a consequence of collaborating with the crowd.

If you don't know what crowd sourcing means, by all means pick up this book- it's a great introduction with some fantastic examples. That said, I can't stand this authors repeated marvel at the power of crowd sourcing. He all but says sourcing the masses will solve the world's problems, but fails to realize that a crowdsourcing model can only exist over the framework of gainful employment. All of the passionate members of the "crowd" couldn't set up their own home shops with the meager earnings the receive from participating in this type of work. Interesting listen at first but hard to make it all the way through.

If you are reading this, you are participating in 'crowdsourcing' and after listening to this, I had to become a member of the audible crowd. Soo...There are lessons in here about how to harness the power of community via the internet. I would recommend to anyone working on sites or applications that included collaborative elements.

The author is definitely someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid, down to the last drop. Nevertheless, this is a useful collection of examples of a growing trend, a social shift. I didn't find myself in complete agreement with the author on everything, nevertheless it is a viewpoint worth listening to.

Although the author doesn't specifically address the 40-hour work week, he does deal with a range of results from that fact. He talks about how people's hobbies are increasingly allowing them to contribute significantly en masse to major projects -- like Linux, a collectively developed free software or uploading thousands of bird sitings to help onithologists track bird migrations. The author talks about the incredible power of the masses in contributing to major developments and notes that the "over education of the middle class" and increasing levels of job dissatisfaction are the cause.

He definitely got some of these elements right, but I think sociologically speaking the meaning of job has changed. After the great depression, a great job was one that fed the family -- assembly line work at an auto manufacturing plant would be an ideal job under that description. However, more recently, employees want more personally engaging, intellectually stimulately jobs which provide creativity outlets for them. Thus, jobs at Google and similar companies that encourage and permit time for employee creativity are more valued. Moreover, companies are beginning to see that sometimes it pays to give employees more latitude.

However, not everyone can work at such places and those who don't have a naturally engaging job look for alternatives for "meaningful work" as the author calls the Pro-Am -- a new term, spelled out the professional amateur, which means amateurs who work at a professional level.

Karl Marx saw humans as naturally creative; I think that's true. And he saw the labor of the the 1800s as demeaning this naturally creative nature, which might also have been true. However, today, as Crowdsourcing illustrates, people have increasing levels of access to universities and institutions of higher learning, more time to devote to hobbies of higher interest and thanks to the Internet, a method by which to collectively collaborate on projects of common interest.

The end result is that this book, unlike many other "new media" books doesn't have a doomsday message. It gives more facts and illustrations and avoid the preachy pitfall some other new media authors have fallen in. It is both a great read -- or listen in my case -- and an excellent collection of facts and realities.

I'm particularly fond of the 5th chapter that traces dilettantism back to Charles Darwin and other great thinkers. It suggests that all of us can now participate in grand adventures like the Voyage of the Beagle, even if we never leave our keyboards and make our personal discoveries by reading the crowd-sourced Wikipedia for new imagination inciting facts. This book is awesome!

This is a great audiobook. It is well read and well produced. The ideas flowed smoothly into my mind without any verbal distractions. Perfect.